Speaker: Tanya Reilly

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Keynote :
The History of Fire Escapes

Location : Broadway Ballroom, 6th fl.

Day of week : Friday

Duration : 9:00am -
10:10am

When a datacenter goes offline, a server gets overloaded, or a binary hits a crashing bug, we usually have a contingency plan. We reduce damage, redirect traffic, page someone, drop low-priority requests, follow documented procedures. But why do many failures still come as a surprise? In this talk, we'll look at how fire safety in buildings parallels how we prevent and manage software failures. Fire partitions. Public safety campaigns. Smoke alarms. Sprinkler systems. Doors that say “This is not an exit”. And fire escapes. We'll look at the journey fire safety took in New York City, from expecting our wooden buildings to catch fire at any moment, to designing in fire resistence from the start. And we'll look at what we can learn from real world fire codes about expecting failure and designing for it.